Re: [rails-oceania] Continuous Integration Server

[Jak Charlton]

Any reason you wouldn't just run it in the background on your MBP?

I often have TeamCity running in the background (depending on project) and rarely even notice it's there ... on last project I even had it running in the background on my horribly underpowered Mac Mini (4gb) for a team of 5 devs, and never noticed it using same Mac Mini for dev

On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 10:56 AM, William Madden <w.a.m...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey guys,

I need a CI server. I've been thinking about this for a little while and I'm leaning towards hosting my own CI server rather than using somebody else's service - primarily because I don't want to pay someone else for something I can maintain and because they tend to be slow. With regard to maintaining my own CI server, here are the conclusions I've come to:

1. Headless servers are extremely frustrating to debug 
• I want to be able to plug in a screen to set everything up, and to debug it when it (inevitably) breaks
  
2. Remote servers tend to be slow
• E.g. Amazon EC2
• Also they cost money I don't have
3. Maintaining my own hardware is fine, but I'm going to be travelling between countries a lot in the next few months and I need to be able to take it with me
• So smaller is better
  

My app is pretty straightforward, a Rails server and HTML/JS frontend tested with RSpec, Jasmine and Cucumber. Running the full suite of tests takes about 2 minutes on my MBP.

I've been thinking about getting a mini-pc/nettop/<stupid sales term for "small computer">. Anybody have any recommendations - either for small portable hardware or for a hosted service that will perform adequately and not cost too much?

Cheers,

Will

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[Sebastian Porto]

Will

We use a mac mini here for the CI server, is that portable enough?
Not cheap, but very flexible.

Sebastian

William Madden

31 October 2012 10:56 AM

[Jack Chen]

I'd look at a Mac Mini running TeamCity. We're using TeamCity at Envato and it's pretty slick. It can give you per-test details rather than just dumping you the build outputs, build chains, personal builds but may be overkill for small projects.

Otherwise there's tddium and semaphore for hosted services.

[Jon Rowe]

Don't be tempted by something with a duff CPU, I've been down that route, tests take so long it not worth it. Maybe consider a chunky (desktop replacement style) laptop if portability is an issue. 

Software wise Jenkins works well (is available by apt on Ubuntu).

Have you considered travis-ci?

Cheers

Jon

[Jack Chen]

+1 on good CPU. Also, consider parallelising your build if you haven't already. Our build would take 2 hours 51 minutes if ran in serial, but in parallel over 2 servers (56 logical CPUs), it runs in just under 7 minutes.

[Ben Hoskings]

Yep, parallelised builds are a huge win. We run parallel across 7 vagrant VMs on an 8-core (4 w/HT) box and the whole build takes around 8 minutes, vs. 30-40 minutes on my macbook. (I usually still run the unit specs locally though, because those only take about 2 minutes.)

Our build is split into 7 chunks: unit, jasmine, and 5x integration (grouped arbitrarily to take roughly the same amount of time each).

The VMs are headless and we run selenium specs via xvfb, which isn't a problem in practise. The build server is just there to say red/green as fast as possible, and then i diagnose specific specs locally (zeus zeus zeus).

- Ben

[Nicholas Jefferson]

> Our build would take 2 hours 51 minutes

What on earth are you building?

Thanks,

Nicholas

[Robert Gravina]

On 31 October 2012 10:18, Nicholas Jefferson <nich...@pythonic.com.au> wrote:
>> Our build would take 2 hours 51 minutes

Ours takes 1 hour across 6-cores. So in serial, 6 hours! :)

But there is a plus side...
http://xkcd.com/303/

Robert

[Fred Wu]

I'm curious, has anyone done any research or benchmarks on running tests with higher frequency CPUs vs more CPU cores? Assuming tests are able to utilise all the cores (via parallel_tests perhaps).